From karaoke terminals to AI résumés: The winners of GitHub’s For the Love of Code challenge

Every developer has that project they build just for the fun of it. You know how it goes: you start by asking “what if?” and then you have something weird and wonderful hours later. 

This summer, we decided to celebrate that spirit with For the Love of Code, our first-ever competition for projects built purely for fun. More than 300 developers answered the call. Some leaned on GitHub Copilot to refactor ideas, fix bugs, and spark inspiration. Some teamed up. Others flew solo, guided only by caffeine and curiosity.

Entries spanned everything from a Copilot you can literally see on camera, and even a comic strip made from your release notes.

We invited participants to build anything that sparks joy across six whimsical categories:

• 🔘 Buttons, beeps & blinkenlights: Hardware hacks, LEDs, sensors, and gadgets galore.
• 🖥️ Terminal talent: Command-line creations and retro computing love letters.
• 🌐 World wide wonders: Browser-based experiments, apps, and interactive art.
• 🤖 Agents of change: AI, bots, and automation with heart.
• 🕹️ Game on: Games big or small, serious or silly.
• 🃏 Everything but the kitchen sink: The wildcard (if it doesn’t fit anywhere else, it fits here).

Meet the winners: Open source experiments, AI side projects, and more

Here are the top three entries from each category.

🔘 Buttons, beeps & blinkenlights 

Plane Tracker: DIY radar on your desk

Adafruit Circuit Playground, Bluetooth, and the ADS-B Exchange API to fetch live flight data. It turns nearby planes into a real-time mini radar display.

Cadrephoto: The easy e-ink photo frame

Cadrephoto by @ozh is a Raspberry Pi and e-ink photo frame that displays pictures emailed to it (no app, no setup, perfect for less tech-savvy people). It checks an inbox, downloads the latest photo, and updates the screen automatically.

BuildIn: Traffic-light builds for your repository

BuildIn by @SUNSET-Sejong-University and @lepetitprince99 is a real-life traffic light for your code that sits on your desk. Using an Arduino and the GitHub API, it lights up red, yellow, green, or blue to show your repository’s build status at a glance.

🖥️ Terminal talent

RestoHack: A roguelike resurrected from 1984

NetHack, rebuilt from the original source with modern tools and a preservationist’s touch. It compiles cleanly, runs faithfully, and proves that forty years later, permadeath still hits hard.

Jukebox CLI

Jukebox CLI by @FedeCarollo is a colorful, animated jukebox that runs right in your terminal. Built in Rust with Ratatui, it plays MP3s, shows floating musical notes, and color-codes each track in a scrollable playlist. You can play, pause, skip, and adjust the volume without ever leaving your command line.

Tuneminal: Sing your commits from the command line

Tuneminal by @heza-ru turns your terminal into a full-blown karaoke stage with scrolling lyrics, live audio visualization, and scoring that rewards your inner rock star. It’s open source, cross-platform, and the perfect excuse to sing while that git clone takes a while.

🌐 World wide wonders

Netstalgia: Surf the ‘90s web on virtual dial-up

Netstalgia by @heza-ru (again!) is a fully functional ‘90s web fever dream built with modern tech, but visually stuck on virtual dial-up. It’s got dancing babies, popup ads, a fake BBS, and more CRT glow than your old Gateway 2000 ever survived.

In true retro internet spirit, it even ships with a fake GitHub Star Ransomware—a tongue-in-cheek “virus” that demands you star the repo to “decrypt your files.” A clever (and harmless) new twist on the eternal quest for GitHub stars. ⭐💾

Bionic Reader: Speed read your screen

Bionic Reader by @Awesome-XV rewires how you read by bolding the first few letters of each word so your brain fills in the rest. It’s like giving your eyes a speed boost without the caffeine jitters to read faster than ever.

The Git Roast Show: Roast your GitHub profile… lovingly

Git Roast Show by @rawrnuck and @Anmol0201 is a full-stack web app that humorously “roasts” your GitHub profile. Built with React, Vite, and Express, it fetches live GitHub data to generate personalized, sound-enhanced, and animated comedy roasts.

Nightlio: a mood tracker you actually own

Nightlio by @shirsakm is a privacy-first mood tracker and daily journal you can self-host in minutes. Log how you feel on a 5-point scale, add Markdown notes, tag entries like #Sleep or #Productivity, then explore calendars, streaks, and simple stats to spot patterns. It runs anywhere with Docker, stores data in a local SQLite file, and keeps things clean with JWT-protected APIs, a React/Vite front end, and optional Google OAuth. No ads. No subscriptions. Your server, your rules.

Note: Because @heza-ru placed in two categories, we’ve added a fourth winner to this category.

🤖 Agents of change

Neosgenesis: AI that thinks about thinking

Neosgenesis by @answeryt is a metacognitive AI framework that teaches machines to think about how they think. It runs a five-stage loop (think, verify, learn, optimize, decide) while juggling multiple LLMs, tools, and real-time feedback. A multi-armed bandit picks the best reasoning patterns, and when it stalls, an “aha” mode explores fresh paths.

MediVision Assistant: Accessible AI healthcare for all

MediVision Assistant by @omkardongre is an AI healthcare companion that helps elderly and disabled users manage their health through voice, image, and video. Users can scan medications, analyze skin conditions, log symptoms by voice, and chat with an AI doctor-like assistant.

Quiviva: The résumé that talks back

Quiviva by @katawiecz is an interactive AI-powered CV that turns a job hunt into a chat adventure. Ask about skills or projects, or type “Gandalf” to unlock secret nerd mode. All this goes to show that even résumés can be fun.

🕹️ Game on

AI-Dventure: Infinite worlds, infinite choices

AI-Dventure by @FedeCarollo is an interactive text adventure built in Rust and powered by OpenAI’s models. Players explore dynamically generated worlds in fantasy, horror, sci-fi, or historical settings where every command shapes the story and no two runs are the same.

BeatBugging: Debug to the beat

BeatBugging by @sandra-aliaga, @Joshep-c, @RyanValdivia, and @tniia turns debugging into a rhythm game that converts your system logs into musical beats. Built in Python, it lets you fix bugs to the rhythm on a 5-by-5 grid and makes debugging sound unexpectedly good.

MuMind: A multiplayer battle of wits and vibes

MuMind by @FontesHabana is a web-based multiplayer version of the party game Herd Mentality, where players try to match the majority’s answers to score points. Built with React, Tailwind CSS, and Framer Motion, it offers multilingual support, lively animations, and a smooth, responsive experience.

🃏 Everything but the kitchen sink

GitFrag: Defrag your contributions graph

@chornonoh-vova built wonderful writeup of how the developer approached it.

Code Sensei: Meditate your way through VS Code

Code Sensei by @redhatsam09 turns your VS Code sessions into a zen pixel adventure where your focus fuels the fun. Type to walk, pause to hop—but stay away too long away and your sensei meets a dramatic, 8-bit demise.

Reviewer Karma: Good vibes for great reviews

Reviewer Karma by @master-wayne7 keeps your pull requests peaceful by rewarding reviewers for good vibes and great feedback. Every emoji, comment, and code critique earns points on a live leaderboard that turns pull request reviews into a friendly competition.

These projects show what’s possible when we let our curiosity take center stage

Remember these are hackathon projects. They might not be feature complete, there may be bugs, spaghetti code, and the occasional rogue program escaped from the Grid. But they are clear examples of what we can accomplish when we do something just for the love of it.

All of our category winners get 12 months of GitHub Copilot Pro+.

If For the Love of Code proved anything, it’s that creativity and code thrive best together—especially with Copilot lending a hand.

Shoutout to the makers

Congratulations to all of our winners: @Anmol0201, @answeryt, @Awesome-XV, @chornonoh-vova, @cpstroum, @Critlist, @FedeCarollo, @FontesHabana, @heza-ru, @joshep-c, @katawiecz, @lepetitprince99, @master-wayne7, @omkardongre, @RyanValdivia, @ozh, @rawrnuck, @redhatsam09, @sandra-aliaga, @shirsakm, @SUNSET-Sejong-University, @tniia.

Massive thank you to our judges, which included a mix of GitHub Stars, Campus Experts, and GitHub Developer Relations friends: @Ba4bes, @colbyfayock, @j0ashm, @JuanGdev, @howard-lio, @luckyjoseph, @metzinaround, @Taiwrash, and @xavidop.

And thank you Copilot for your assistance!

Now back to work everyone! Playtime is over.

💜 If you enjoyed For the Love of Code, stay tuned… Game Off 2025 begins this November!

Written by

Lee Reilly

@leereilly

Senior Program Manager, GitHub Developer Relations. Open source hype man, AI whisperer, hackathon and game jam wrangler. I write && manage programs, support dev communities, and occasionally ship something.